1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a record carrier feeding and ejection device; and more particularly, to a device which automatically feeds cards, one at a time, from a supply magazine to a processing station and then ejects the processed card in the reverse direction to a storage magazine, which device can also accept or eject single cards from and to a buffer channel separate from the magazines.
Feeding devices of this general type are commonly used in accounting machines in which record cards, or carriers, are manually introduced individually to the processing station, and are ejected after processing into the channel through which they were introduced. Mechanisms of this type, to which the instant invention is related, are to be contrasted with those in which a record carrier is not returned in the reverse direction, but after processing is transported further in the general direction of feed-in and ejected downwardly. Record sheet and card handling devices of the general type being discussed have the common characteristic that a new card or record carrier can be inserted only after the previously processed carrier or card has been removed from the feeding device.
Often a number of record carriers are to be processed successively; for example, when interest accrues or payments are to be posted for all bank accounts, in order to speed this processing over that achieved when cards are individually fed and removed by hand one after the other, auxiliary mechanisms and automatic feeders have been developed to provide fast processing of a stack of cards.
2. Description of the Prior Art
German Offenlegungsschrift No. 2,606,697, to which copending U.S. application Ser. No. 766,661 assigned to the assignee of the instant application corresponds except for minor additions, discloses a feeding device of the general type described above. This device has a magazine for record carrier cards; a guide channel leading from the supply magazine to a second guide channel; an ejection channel leading from the second guide channel to the storage magazine; and a deflector for guiding a card being ejected either into the second guide channel for automatic magazine storage, or outward through a separate channel to an ejection station for manual removal. Because of the interrelationship of these channels and the use of the deflector, a further card to be processed cannot be fed from the supply magazine into the input guide channel until the previously processed card has been manually removed from the ejection station or has been transported entirely into the storage magazine. Similarly, manual feeding of a further card to a region below the deflector must await the manual removal of the previously processed card.
Another record card feeder, described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,598,396, allows either manual introduction or removal of single cards, or automatic feed from a supply magazine or to a storage magazine. A gate or deflector is located at the junction of an input channel with a buffer channel into which cards are moved for processing and to and from which they can be manually fed and removed, and an ejection channel through which cards in the input channel can be directed to a storage magazine. Automatically fed cards from the supply magazine and manually fed cards pass over the deflector in such a position that feeding is impossible while the deflector is set for ejection, although it would be topologically possible to feed a card from the supply magazine to the input channel while a previously processed card was awaiting removal from the buffer channel.